ORANGE, MA – Spirits and poltergeists from across the country are being forced to abandon mysterious old houses in favor of cots in gymnasiums.

ORANGE, MA – Spirits and poltergeists from across the country are being forced to abandon mysterious old houses in favor of cots in gymnasiums.

“We’re haunting the shelters now,” wryly noted the ghost of Adelaide Wilkins, a Civil War-era apparition once murdered by her husband in a jealous rage.

Since the housing bubble burst at the onset of the recession, the moody, atmospheric properties of our mythical past have been facing widespread foreclosures. “Any ghosts who happen to be on the premises at the time of the bank’s order,” said one bank’s legal spokesman, “will just have to find some place else to go.”

But for many of the ghosts, that’s much easier said than done.

“I’ve been dead for two hundred years,” said a headless phantom who spoke on necessary condition of anonymity. “Who can I call to put me up for the night?”

The result has been an influx of haunters of all kinds to the nation’s shelter system, with uneven results.

“I tried sending a message from beyond the grave to this lady I met, about finding the place where they buried me,” recounted an eerie-looking child once drowned by an insane nanny. “But she just thought I was trying to steal her pillow.”

As the crisis deepens, more ghosts are becoming disillusioned about the changing face of spooky places.

“I though I knew beings with unfinished business and heavy emotional baggage before,” said one ghost recently forced from a fog-shrouded Victorian estate. “But that balding guy with the jacket? You know the one I mean, the guy who keeps muttering about tuna fish? Elliot? Man. That guy’s got some issues.”